Nurturing young democracies, through the Gorbachev Foundation.

By T. Anthony Jones

Most of us can remember exactly where we were on momentous occasions. Last March, on the evening President George W. Bush announced that U.S. troops had entered Iraq, I was watching television at the New York home of Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations, along with the former presidents of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, and the former prime ministers of Canada and South Korea.

Earlier that day, we’d all been at former president Bill Clinton’s office in Harlem, talking with him about assisting emerging democracies and dealing with the AIDS crisis in Africa.

So how did a Northeastern professor, you might ask, end up in such company? Actually, as I watched President Bush with world leaders who had faced emergencies of their own and listened to their comments, I was wondering the same thing. Yet I had only to glance across the room at George Matthews, also there that evening, to remember how the seeds were sown.

It all started back in 1997, with a series of conversations between Matthews, then chairman of the Northeastern Board of Trustees, and Mikhail Gorbachev. At the time, the former Soviet president was looking for a university that would be an appropriate site for a foundation bearing his name, a center for the discussion of contemporary issues.

Fortunately, Matthews was able to persuade Gorbachev that Northeastern would be an ideal location, clinching the deal after bringing him to campus several times. When a small group of trustees agreed to sponsor the new organization, Northeastern became the home of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America (GFNA), housed in Renaissance Park.

My part in the enterprise was purely accidental, the result of a chance meeting with Matthews a few weeks after the foundation had been publicly announced. A Sovietologist since the 1960s, I’d found myself, after the USSR’s collapse in 1991, without a country to study. As a longtime admirer of Gorbachev, I naturally was interested in his new link with Northeastern.

Matthews, the GFNA chair, didn’t want the foundation to be just another Russian studies center; he envisioned it as an organization designed to focus on important global issues of the day.

I was asked to help him identify projects and develop a network of members who would help us become visible in the crowded world of international foundations.

To succeed, we knew we’d have to attract a prestigious group of senior fellows. To date, there have been eighteen such appointments, including a Nobel Prize winner in economics, a former president, two former prime ministers, a former commander in chief of U.S. strategic forces, a former director of U.S. intelligence, and a former minister in British prime minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, as well as other luminaries from the worlds of research and business. Our eclectic group reflects GFNA’s nonpartisanship and commitment to a diversity of views.

Two of our senior fellows played an especially key role early on, suggesting and facilitating a landmark meeting. Former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell had the idea that GFNA should organize a conference on how to successfully democratize a nation. Because Spain has undergone one of the most successful post–World War II political transitions, she thought Madrid might provide a natural venue for such a gathering.

Diego Hidalgo, a well-known Spanish intellectual and businessman, offered to finance the meeting, making it a joint venture between GFNA and his own foundation in Madrid, the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior.

And so our conference on democratic transition and consolidation was born. Looking back, it was a project that never should have worked.

First, it was almost too ambitious. We invited about a hundred international experts to prepare reports on how best to develop and sustain a democracy, which a large group of heads of state would discuss at the conference. To our surprise, all our democracy experts and thirty-three current and former presidents and prime ministers agreed to participate.

Thanks to Hidalgo’s personal connections, we had the support of Spain’s prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, who put his security services and diplomatic corps at our disposal, and King Juan Carlos, who offered to chair a plenary session. Gorbachev would chair the conference. Bill Clinton, arriving with his daughter, Chelsea, would give a speech. Everything was set. The symposium was scheduled for October 19–27, 2001.

Then came September 11. In its wake, many of us doubted that heads of state would be able to travel or that other participants would feel safe enough to fly. We considered postponing or even canceling the conference. But because we felt we might never be able to gather such a group again, we decided to go forward.

We knew this was the correct decision after we got a call from Brazil’s president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Originally unable to attend, he said he’d rearranged his schedule to get to Madrid, since he considered the meeting more necessary than ever in light of the attacks.

The conference was not only an astonishing success but—at the request of the participating heads of state—we used it to launch a new organization, which we called the Club of Madrid. Its purpose was to allow national leaders who have had the personal experience of creating or consolidating a democracy to provide peer advice to other leaders currently embarked on the same path.

Membership in the Club of Madrid is open only to former presidents or prime ministers who have both shown a commitment to democracy and remained personally free from the taint of violence or corruption. In addition, no more than 20 percent of the club’s members may come from developed nations.

There are now fifty-five members in the Club of Madrid. Its executive committee, which includes club president Henrique Cardoso, was the group gathered in New York on the day hostilities began in Iraq.

Though the club is a major focus of GFNA’s activities, it’s not the only one. We’re also involved in projects dealing with the global economy, the effects of technology on democracy, and other international issues. We have organized programs in Spain and at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England, and have collaborated with Microsoft through its Government Leaders Forum.

In April, we held an international conference on corporate governance and investment in Eastern Europe—designed and organized by Sheila Puffer, a professor at the College of Business Administration—which brought people from fourteen countries to campus.

And in September, we held a two-day conference in South Korea on issues of regional integration and security, organized jointly with the East Asia Institute in Seoul and hosted by former prime minister Lee Hong-Koo. While there, Campbell, Matthews, and I visited the demilitarized zone. We stepped into North Korea—only by about fifteen feet, but it still counts; we also stood on the “bridge of no return,” which prisoners of war crossed to choose their country, North or South, after the end of the Korean War in 1953.

It’s hard to believe how far GFNA has come in just six years, harder still to fully appreciate the extraordinary experiences I’ve had and the friends I’ve made. The foundation is poised for its next challenge: strengthening the connection between Northeastern and the international networks we’ve built, while continuing to bring the university to the attention of leaders around the world.

T. Anthony Jones, associate professor in the Sociology and Anthropology department, is vice president and executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation of North America. To learn more about GFNA efforts, visit the foundation’s website at <www.gfna.net>.